Ongoing AIDS also involves refusing to accept that education and job training that give people an interesting, valued social role are the best prevention against drug abuse. That getting into effective rehab should be as easy as getting into jail. That needle exchange should be as pervasive as liquor stores and—as Linda Villarosa pointed out on the front page of the New York Times in 2004—that the incarceration of African American men has created an unpartnerable generation of heterosexual Black women, thereby rendering them more vulnerable to unsafe sex and AIDS infection. Finally, ongoing AIDS means recognizing that people become infected, as Douglas Crimp said about his own sero-conversion after twenty years of AIDS activism, “because I'm human.”
In this book, however, I am mostly concerned with past AIDS. I am driven by its enormous, incalculable influence on our entire cultural mindset and the parallel silence about this fact. Do you know what I mean when I refer to “AIDS of the past”?
I am talking about the Plague (the overlapping period between Perestroika and Gentrification.) The years from 1981 to 1996, when there was a mass death experience of young people. Where folks my age watched in horror as our friends, their lovers, cultural heroes, influences, buddies, the people who witnessed our lives as we witnessed theirs, as these folks sickened and died consistently for fifteen years. Have you heard about it?
Amazingly, there is almost no conversation in public about these events or their consequences. Every gay person walking around who lived in New York or San Francisco in the 1980s and early 1990s is a survivor of devastation and carries with them the faces, fading names, and corpses of the otherwise forgotten dead. When you meet a queer New Yorker over the age of forty, this should be your first thought, just as entire male generations were assumed to have fought in World War II or Korea or Vietnam. Our friends died and our world was destroyed because of the neglect of real people who also have names and faces. Whether they were politicians or parents, as people with AIDS literally fought in the streets or hid in corners until they too died or survived, others—their relatives, neighbors, “friends,” coworkers, presidents, landlords, and bosses—stood by and did nothing.
81,542 people have died of AIDS in New York City as of August 16, 2008. These people, our friends, are rarely mentioned. Their absence is not computed and the meaning of their loss is not considered.
2,752 people died in New York City on 9/11. These human beings have been highly individuated. The recognition of their loss and suffering is a national ritual, and the consequences of their aborted potential are assessed annually in public. They have been commemorated with memorials, organized international gestures, plaques on many fire and police stations, and a proposed new construction on the site of the World Trade Center, all designed to make their memory permanent. Money has been paid to some of their survivors. Their deaths were avenged with a brutal, bloody, and unjustified war against Iraq that has now caused at least 94,000 civilian deaths and 4,144 military deaths.
The deaths of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of twenty years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don't matter with deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person's life is more important than another's. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person's death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital.
In 1987, ACT UP's affinity group Gran Fury created an installation in the window of the New Museum. It may have been the first work about AIDS in a major art institution. The installation was called Let The Record Show. Employing the politics of accountability at the root of ACT UP's ethos, the show featured photographs of real-life individuals who were causing the deaths of our friends. People like North Carolina senator Jesse Helms. Helms had just said that the government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as the result of “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.” In the background of the installation was a photo of the Nuremburg trials. The implication was that the specific people who caused our friends to die would one day be made accountable. They would be reduced from their undeserved grandeur into wilted hovering little men like Rudolph Hess wasting away in Spandau prison. However in the end, our public enemies, people like Cardinal Ratzinger, who called homosexuality “an intrinsic moral evil,” Mayor Ed Koch, President Ronald Reagan, et cetera, all got away with it. No one was ever made accountable. Our friend Sal Licata spent nine days on a gurney in a hallway of a New York City hospital. He never got a hospital room. And then he died. No one has ever had to account for this. When Jesse Helms died, his life was marked benignly. His crimes against humanity were barely mentioned. The names of our friends whom Ronald Reagan murdered are not engraved in a tower of black marble. There has never been a government inquiry into the fifteen years of official neglect that permitted AIDS to become a world-wide disaster.
Where is our permanent memorial?
Not the AIDS quilt, now locked up in storage somewhere, but the government-sponsored invitation to mourn and under-stand, equal to Maya Lin's memorial to the dead in Vietnam? Where is our wall of white marble with the names of every New Yorker who died of government neglect, and blank tablets with room for more to come, surrounding a white marble fountain spouting water the color of blood? Where is our special prosecutor appointed by the president to investigate fifteen years of U.S. governmental indifference and its product—the global AIDS crisis? This corrupt abandonment of our people is far more destructive than Watergate, Iran-Contra, COINTELPRO, and every other government scandal that has resulted in special investigative hearings.
Where is our federal aid to survivors and damaged communities?
Where are the children of people who died of AIDS? There must be hundreds of thousands of them. Most children of murdered parents coalesce into some kind of community, but not these. I fear that the descendants of people who died of AIDS do not fully understand that their parents perished because of governmental and societal neglect. Not because they were gay or used drugs. Where is our Nuremberg trial? Where is our catharsis, our healing? Where is our post-traumatic stress diagnosis? Where is our recovery?
The period I address here is the confluence of the waning of the epicenter of the AIDS crisis and the stabilization of gentrification and gentrified thinking. This is when the radical direct action expression of gay liberation began to be overwhelmed by assimilation—one of the principal consequences of AIDS. But I think that Day One of the triumph of gentrified thought was actually November 10, 1996, the morning when the people who ran the New York Times (or “New York Crimes” as Gran Fury called them) decided that of all the lesbian and gay thinkers and activists in this vast nation, of all the LGBT leaders who had bravely built our communities for fifty years…the person who should be given a platform was…Andrew Sullivan. That he was the man who made them the most comfortable. He was the most “Timesy,” as an editor there once told me. So they chose him to say in the “paper of record” (the same paper that ignored the AIDS crisis until ACT UP forced them to acknowledge it) (the same paper that would not mention people's surviving partners in their obituaries) (the same paper that would not print the word gay) that we had all come to a time that would be known as “the end of AIDS.”
Andrew then went on to become the gay spokesperson of choice for the ruling class for almost fifteen years. This statement, one that every queer person whom
I knew in 1996 under-stood to be wrong, absurd, and stupid—this crazy, diabolical, and poisonous statement—earned Sullivan credibility with the power elite. It allowed him to eclipse the actual queer and AIDS community, their organically evolved leadership, and become the gentrified PWA (person with AIDS)—the gay man with AIDS who would lie and therefore replace all the AIDS activists who were telling the truth. Gentrification had to be in place for someone like him to be put into power. He is a symptom.
Eight months later, in 1997, the Key West Literary Seminar focused on the literature of AIDS. It was a gathering of most of the surviving pioneers of AIDS literature, including Mark Doty, Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Tony Kushner, Dale Peck, and myself. The list of names of the pioneers of AIDS literature who were already dead by 1997 is five times as long as those who lived. At one point during the conference, critic Michael Bronski shared a startling insight from the stage. He said that the rubric “AIDS literature” is itself an expression of homophobia, because without denial, oppression, and indifference, these works would be called “American literature.” The cultural apparatus was instructing Americans that those works telling the truth about heterosexual cruelty, gay political rebellion, sexual desire, and righteous anger were not to be recognized. It was a living reenactment of Herbert Marcuse's insight into what he called “repressive tolerance,” in which communities become distorted and neutered by the dominant culture's containment of their realities through the noose of “tolerance.” The dominant culture doesn't change how it views itself or how it operates, and power imbalances are not transformed. What happens instead is that the oppressed person's expression is overwhelmed by the dominant person's inflationary self-congratulation about how generous they are. The subordinate person learns quickly that they must curb their most expressive instincts in order to be worthy of the benevolence of this containment.
Milan Kundera's masterful novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting engages the ways that pretending away the truth cripples the integrity of both individuals and nations. The very privilege of supremacy—the ability to deny that other people are real— becomes the fatal flaw keeping us from collective integrity as a society. Thus, pretending away the deaths of 540,436 adults and 5,369 children from AIDS in the United States of America (as of 2008) becomes a mammoth action of self-deception, with enormous consequences for our decency. Ignoring AIDS as it was happening, and then pretending that past AIDS has no impact on survivors or perpetrators, allows us to pretend that ongoing AIDS is inevitable, sad, and impossible to change.
There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It's a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It's a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.
It is helpful in this moment to think back to ACT UP's politics of accountability: If someone hurts you, you have the right to respond. Your response is the consequence of their violating action. Pharmaceutical executives, politicians who have pledged to represent and serve the American people, religious leaders who claim moral authority—anyone who interfered with progress for people with AIDS was made to face a consequence for the pain they caused. To do this, ACT UP had to identify what needed to be changed, identify the individuals who were obstructing that change, clearly propose courses of action that were doable and justifiable, and then force the people with power—through the tactic of direct action—to do Something different than what they wanted to do. Making people accountable is always in the interest of justice. The dominant, however, hate accountability. Vagueness, lack of delineation of how things work, the idea that people do not have to keep their promises—these tactics always serve the lying, the obstructive, the hypocritical.
I've noticed through my long life that people with vested interest in things staying the way they are regularly insist that both change and accountability are impossible.
“It's never going to change,” a wealthy, white, male, MFA-trained playwright told me about the exclusion of women playwrights from the American theater. “And if you try, people will say you are difficult.”
On the other hand, Audre Lorde—Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet—told me, “That you can't fight City Hall, is a rumor being spread by City Hall.”
As we become conscious about the gentrified mind, the value of accountability must return to our vocabulary and become our greatest tactic for change. Pretending that AIDS is not happening and never happened, so that we don't have to be accountable, destroys our integrity and therefore our future. Ignoring the reality that our cities cannot produce liberating ideas for the future from a place of homogeneity keeps us from being truthful about our inherent responsibilities to each other. For in the end, all this self-deception and replacing, this prioritizing and marginalizing, this smoothing over and pushing out, all of this profoundly affects how we think. That then creates what we think we feel.
CHAPTER THREE
Realizing That They're Gone
When novelist Kathy Acker died in 1997 at the age of fifty-one, she was poised to become recognized as America's leading experimentalist. Her predecessors William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg had recently passed away, and it was— in effect—her turn. Shortly after her death, a conference was organized in her honor at New York University by her friends Avital Ronell, Carla Harryman, and Amy Scholder, and some of her works were reissued. But, truthfully, Kathy has quickly fallen off the radar. Her books are rarely taught, and younger writers seem unaware of her huge influence. What I tend to tell my students is that “when you look in the mirror and see a smart, angry girl who wants to be free, you're seeing a paradigm that Kathy helped bring into the realm of the recognizable.” Although Kathy died of bad treatment decisions regarding her breast cancer, gentrification and the AIDS crisis were part of the reason that she has disappeared from view. In a sense, her context is gone. Not that she was a gay male icon, but rather that she was a founder and product of an oppositional class of artists, those who spoke back to the system rather than replicating its vanities. That's why her death belongs in this chapter.
Kathy started her career by sending out her early works The Black Tarantula and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec in chap-book form to key people in the newly evolving avant-garde arts movements of the 1970s. In this way she built a small but culturally influential readership and collaborated with a wide variety of innovative masters from Richard Foreman to the Mekons. She was an articulator of the post-sixties bohemian bad girl. Not a hippie but a kind of art thug. Kathy was the girl who knew she had something to say that mattered, who loved sex and music and refused to be obedient. Later cultural movements like punk girls, riot grrrls, rockers, goths, and even, weirdly, the deadly chick lit, can trace their origins to the territory she pioneered and the devoted followings she inspired in her day, with books like Don Quixote (my favorite), Blood and Guts in High School, and Great Expectations. Typically, though absurdly, she was mocked in her New York Times obituary by writer Rick Lyman as a “willfully abrasive novelist” instead of as an autonomous artist with a vision. He also annoyingly turned her into a jester by asserting that “Ms. Acker cut a well-known figure in the East Village scene of the early '80s, favoring leather clothes, spiky hair styles, red lipstick and stiletto heels.” A lot of people wore leather in the 1980s and as far as I know, wearing red lipstick is not a distinguishing feature worth mentioning in the obituary of an important artist. But that's how the diminishment process works.
Kathy is emblematic to me of one of the stages of Gentrification, the forgettin
g of pioneering artists and their innovative contributions. The challenge is realizing the meaning behind the fact that they are gone, and how difficult it is to individuate in the AIDS era, when the losses are so numerous and cumulative. As Jim Hubbard and I reviewed footage and still photography for his film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, we repeatedly saw faces that we could no longer attach to names. I had almost forgotten Mark Fotopoulos, until he kept popping up in archival footage. This was the guy who used to stand alone at every demonstration with a sign saying “Living With AIDS 2 Years and 3 Months, no thanks to you Mr. Reagan.” Every month he would update the numbers. Three Months, Four Months, Three Years. He's in each demonstration somewhere, in a corner, in a backdrop, standing to the side holding his sign. Then at some point he is no longer there. Only when I start looking for him in the footage do I realize that he has become an apparition. He stops appearing long before I recognize his absence, and only when I understand this fact does it become clear to me that he must have died. Maybe one day he just didn't feel well enough to come out with his sign, and then he stopped coming altogether, and then he died.
The dancer Scott Heron told me that the porn theater on Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue, which is now a CVS drugstore, used to have a loop of AIDS activist videos running in the skanky basement. This may be the same place where the artist David Wojnarowicz met his boyfriend Tom Rauff enbart. David wore a sign on the back of his jacket saying, “When I die, throw my body on the steps of the FDA.” When he died, there was a political funeral, and then soon after, ACT UP held the “Ashes Action,” in which men and women threw the ashes of their lovers, friends, and fathers onto the lawn of the White House. Anyway, Scottie says that among all the porn loops in the basement booths, there was one clip of Michael Callen, one of the inventors of safe sex, talking about how he was going to beat AIDS, talking about his new book Surviving AIDS.
The Gentrification of the Mind Page 5